ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the contemporary historiographic trend mirrors in the development of ancient historiography. It explores the similar development within the ancient historians, and uses four dream narratives reproduced in the documents. Dreams and fantasy have something in common: both resort the ideological patterns of everyday existence at the same time as challenging them by their difference. This 'externalization' approach is unlikely to be sufficient, at least in a crude form: too many of Herodotus's other dreams resist that approach, for instance by conveying information that the dreamer could not possibly have known and anyway that approach works better for Xerxes, who might well 'internally' regret his impulsiveness, than for Artabanus. Tacitus have moved forward 500 years, to the beginning of the second century AD, has prophetic, 'from outside' dreams, to be distanced from his central field of vision. Plutarch describes the last days of Gaius Marius, locked in civil war with Lucius Cornelius Sulla.
